


the king of the jailhouse and the queen of the road

by mollivanders



Category: Lost
Genre: Coda, F/M, Gen, On the Run, Post-Series, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-09
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-11-12 03:25:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11153244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/pseuds/mollivanders
Summary: “I can’t tell you that,” she says, her tone distant, but when she looks at him, there’s definitely a hint of a smile around her eyes. He frowns, confused. “What, you don’t trust me now?”She shrugs, looking back out at the road. “Tiger don’t change its stripes,” she says, and even though she’s actually smiling now, it’s a private smile, not for him. He can’t tell where the joke ends and the truth begins.(Given the circumstances, he can’t blame her.)





	the king of the jailhouse and the queen of the road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [patsywalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/patsywalker/gifts).



> Written for patsywalker over @ tumblr for several prompts including "a kiss to bruised skin" and "just stay with me". Title comes from Aimee Mann's song of the same name

When the plane lands, he takes off without a word. He’d meant what he said.

(Some people are meant to be alone.)

For all that, he cannot help but look back one last time. The survivors are busy and distracted. Miles and Richard deep in conversation; Frank is on the radio, telling someone they are alive and Kate –

Kate is helping Claire off the plane, murmuring encouragement as the younger woman takes unsteady step after step. Despite himself, he drinks in the sight of her – long brown hair coiling over her shoulders, sharp eyes fixed on the woman she had risked everything to save, her world collapsing from the horizon to a single person.

There ain’t no place for him in that. There ain’t no place for him anywhere.

(Still, leaving her there, he can’t help think she was right.

It wasn’t all for nothin’.)

+

Three years later in a bar outside Tallahassee, he hears a scuffle outside in the parking lot. It’s a small town and bar fights are about all the entertainment it has going for it, so he drags himself out of his seat to see what’s going on, fighting the drunken stupor pulling at his eyes.

Stumbling to the door, he sees a woman at the center of it and frowns in surprise. She must be some kind of woman to get in a fight in _this_ town. It’s not a reason to step closer, and it’s not a reason to get involved. He doesn’t get involved, and he doesn’t make attachments.

(Still, there’s something familiar….)

Squinting, he takes another step closer, a ghost of a memory drawing him in. The blonde takes a swing at a man twice her size, hitting him low and bringing him down in a pile at her feet, and an old admiration swim to the surface. It can’t be. It can’t.

(He takes another step closer.)

He’s known plenty of women after all, and knows better than to show his face again to most of them. It doesn’t matter though, and for one insane moment, the blonde curls trailing down her back send him in a heart-stopping tailspin.

 _Juliet_?

Her name is almost on his lips but he stops short, shaking himself back on guard. The woman is too short and spitting with life – and in this life, people don’t come back when they leave.

When she finally turns around, the frame of her jaw catching in the moonlight, his heart stops twice over, green eyes catching his own.

She freezes, taking her eyes off her opponent in a dangerous misstep as he lumbers back up behind her. Before he can think, before he can even _warn_ her, Sawyer takes a step forward and swings hard into the man’s head with a glancing blow to his eye, finishing what she’d started. Drunk as he is, sloppy as his aim is, out of practice as he is – the other man goes down for good this time.

And then she’s standing in front of him, a deer in headlights, and he wants to ask so many questions (wants to ask more than would fill a lifetime). Instead –

“Long time no see, Freckles,” he says, throat scratchy from disuse, and his arms ache with emptiness.

(He pretends, for her sake, he doesn't see her flinch.)

+

Back at his hotel, she flinches as he dresses her knuckles, bruised and bloody from her fight.

_Why were you in a fight? Why are you in Tallahassee? Did you know I was here? Don’t you know not to come looking for me anymore?_

“That hurt?” he asks and she drops her eyes away from him. He’d bet the take from his biggest con that she still knows how to play him, still knows how to pull his strings. It had taken him far too long to recognize her talent the first time around, and by then she was gone.

(Old habits and all.)

“Thanks,” she says and curls her feet up under her on the worn mattress. “Saves me the trouble of robbing a convenience store.”

He wants to grin – wants to laugh for the first time in years – but he doesn’t.

“Blonde?” he asks, gesturing at her hair as the least important question somehow tumbles out of his mouth first. She shrugs, indifferent, and he tries not to take it personally (he was never very good at that). “Yeah,” she confirms, as if he doesn’t have eyes and his question wasn’t a hundred times more loaded. “When Claire and I were….” Her voice trails off and she looks right past him. “If I wanted to stick around, I needed to pass for her sister.”

(There are so many pieces to her life he never bothered to ask about before they parted again. How she lived after he had jumped out of the helicopter, what happened in her trial, why _she_ was the one who had to come back for Claire, why it mattered enough to smash his life to pieces – )

He stops. It’s not her fault.

(Never was.)

“Someone busted you?” he asks and she sighs, her hands curling into fists once more.

“Someone busted me,” she confirms.

She never was very good, he recalls, at telling the truth (the whole truth) and somehow that, of all things, brings a smile to his face.

“I hope you got them,” he says, more hopeful than usual and she finally looks at him again. His breath catches in his chest and the folly of his words come back to him. _Is three years long enough to get over someone?_

“I had to choose,” she says, and there are burnt embers in her eyes where there used to be oceans. “I chose Claire and Aaron.”

He swallows at the unfamiliar defeat in her voice and wishes for a drink.

“You have a place to stay?” he asks and when she shakes her head, he decides none of the other answers matter.

“Stay with me,” he says, and he doesn’t mean it to come out like a prayer, or an invitation, but she sees through him (always did).

Still – she stays.

(She stays.)

+

There’s only one bed, and if he were a gentleman –

As it is, they share.

Three years has been kinder to her in some ways than to him, and he tries not to stare as she slips her pants off, sliding under the blanket quick as can be. Memories threaten to bubble to the surface, an image of her shimmying out of her clothes and diving into a deep pool of water with him.

(Death lurked there too.)

Instead, he kicks off his shoes and climbs in next to her. She’s staring at the ceiling and _fuck_ , she’s crying? Alarm sings through his body before he realizes that she’s _not_ crying, but close enough. She looks like a ghost of her former self, the woman he’d left twice over, the woman who he would have sworn didn’t need a damn thing from him

Three years gone, that woman is a shadow.

(He takes back every crude thought he’s had since he saw her, fierce and wild, in the parking lot.)

“How long since you saw them?” he asks, curiosity pulling at him. He doesn’t really care – he _doesn’t_ – but it would be nice to know that Claire and Aaron and Miles and even Richard are doing okay.

She turns over, pulling the blanket up to her chest and he thinks _okay, if that’s how she wants to play it, fine_ , old defenses springing up. It pisses him off, but at himself more than anything.

Then, a few heavy moments after he shuts off the light, she answers him.

“Seven weeks,” she says, her voice a sliver in the darkness, and then, before he can ask another question, shuts him off. “Goodnight, Sawyer,” she says, sounding less a hair less defeated than before, and maybe – maybe – there is some good in this world if she’s here with him again.

(Somehow, he doubts she’ll be there by morning.)

+

(Somehow, she is.)

+

They start travelling together, because the alternative is too bleak for either of them. Most days, he can’t stop staring at her, and he knows she can tell. Knows she won’t do anything about it either.

“Pork rinds or Pringles?” she asks, getting back in the car and tossing both in his lap. He grins, tossing the Pringles back at her.

“Nice try, Freckles,” he says, the old name slipping from his tongue again and though she pauses, rustling in the plastic bag at her feet, she doesn’t correct him.

That first day, they drive through two states, putting four hundred miles behind them. He does all the driving, and Kate seems content – accepting – of going wherever. Anywhere. As the days follow each other and she hasn’t left, they take turns. She plays Patsy Cline and he reads, pushing his glasses up as they slide down his nose. They drive through parts of the country they’ve both seen before and don’t pay much attention to anything. In a seemingly random pattern, they stop at Sunset Banks throughout the country for Kate to make withdrawal from an account in the name of Mary Phillips.

(Something about the name calls to him, but again – he’s known more women than he can count.)

“You going to tell me the rules?” he asks one day when he’s at the wheel and she’s got her shoes up on the dashboard. She doesn’t hang them out the window like the kids they pass on the road do – always ready to run, that one.

“Rules?” she asks, pushing her hair back, curls falling in her face. He steals another look and then focuses on the road ahead. “With Claire,” he explains.

She’s silent for so long he thinks he’s thrown them back to that first night, that first day, when she barely spoke at all, and when they relied on memory more than instinct.

“I can’t tell you that,” she says, her tone distant, but when she looks at him, there’s definitely a hint of a smile around her eyes. He frowns, confused. “What, you don’t trust me now?”

She shrugs, looking back out at the road. “Tiger don’t change its stripes,” she says, and even though she’s actually smiling now, it’s a private smile, not for him. He can’t tell where the joke ends and the truth begins.

(Given the circumstances, he can’t blame her.)

Instead, he just steals another look at her when she’s not looking.

+

She ditches the blonde curls when her roots start to show, but if he thought he was going to see a glimpse of the woman he knew, he was wrong. She comes out of the bathroom drying red hair that she’s cut to hang around her shoulders and honestly, if she just shifted her expression just – _just like that_ , he thinks, watching her – he wouldn’t recognize her.

( _Liar_ , he adds, if only to himself.)

He learns her disguises as well as he ever learned anything about her, and damned as he is, he actually learns something form her. He only ever conned desperate wives stuck in dead-end marriages; she can con anyone she meets. Once, Jack had told him what the marshal had said about her. _She will do anything to get away_.

Well, as long as he gets to come with – he ain’t complaining.

Once a week, she drops a postcard in the mail, but anytime he catches a look at the address, it’s addressed to different people in different places.

Turns out she really doesn’t trust him after all.

(Trust, he admits, goes both ways.)

+

“How long do you think we can do this?” he asks one day as she slides into the driver’s seat. They’ve switched cars a dozen times by now but she never seems to feel safe. She wakes sometimes in the night, clutching her knees and hiding her face in a curtain of hair, but she never says why or about what.

Anyway, he can guess.

(She doesn’t have many keepsakes – just one, a picture of a blonde little boy about five years old. He has Jack’s eyes.)

“You ask a lot of questions, Sawyer,” she says, starting the car, and he rolls his eyes, pushing the seat further back.

“I _have_ a lot of questions, Freckles,” he says and she shrugs. “Good thing you don’t really need the answers then,” she says, and the car revs to life.

+

In another life, he might be bored, driving around the country with no aim, nothing to do, and only Kate for company.

(In this one – )

She changes her look the way he changes clothes and sometimes more often. He thinks that if he wasn’t travelling with her – if he disappeared for a few days on his own – she could slip away like water down the drain and he’d never see her again. He’s easy to find, he guesses, if anybody cared to.

(He reckons he’s about run out of second chances with her.)

Other nights, he wonders if they’re not so bad for each other after all. She doesn’t sleep through every night but she does sleep quiet in the circle of his arms. He doesn’t _always_ compare her to someone else he lost, years and years ago, a memory worn and faded thin from overuse.

( _Is three years long enough to get over someone?_ )

“You’re not bored?” she asks one day, looking up from the magazine she’s flipping through to peer at him. “Hit up a bank, con a lady?” It’s one of those times where she sounds teasing, but he knows better. Patsy Cline croons at him from the tape deck and the broken heart of her voice rattles in his skull.

“Don’t you listen to anything else?” he asks instead of answering her question and she looks out at the road, humming along. _If you’ve got leaving on your mind…_

“That’s not an answer,” she says. “What were you doing in Tallahassee before I showed up anyway?”

It’s the first real question she’s asked him. His knuckles tighten around the steering wheel and he puts more pressure on the gas.

“I guess we’re good then,” she says, and also for the first time, he hears the edge of doubt in her voice. Like so many other times, he has no good answers to give her.

(They keep driving.)

+

Slowly, as the summer stretches out into the fall, crisp leaves scattering across the empty country roads they travel, her hair grows long, down her back. She shifts between colors and styles, sometimes elegant, sometimes a mess, and he loves both.

(He can admit that now. He loves her, still, even if she’ll never believe him again.)

They curl up in hotel rooms together, sharing space and lives and all that come between. He stops asking himself how long it’ll last. It’s lasted – he’s lasted – she’s lasted – longer than he ever imagined. He doesn’t know what she imagined, but if he had to guess, it was a wild, fiery ending facing off with a hundred police. Now though, he sees them growing older. There are gray hairs creeping through her roots and he needs glasses all the time now. The beer gut he’d grown while she was gone has shrunk, though driving all day hasn’t done him any favors. Days where they can’t drive anymore, they strike out on foot, someplace cars won’t take them, and he tries to remember every detail she ever told him about her father, every lesson she ever tried to teach about tracking, and everything else from a trek chasing a boar.

(Most days are good, almost. It’s the closest they’ll ever come.)

+

“What do you want, Sawyer?” she asks, basking in the sun. They’re sitting on the hood of the car, leaning back on the front window as they share lunch from a greasy fast food joint. She licks her fingers, cleaning the salt off them, and he looks away into the sun.

“You want some crime, Freckles?” he asks and she laughs, leaning back on her elbows. There’s a shade of judgement in her laugh as if he’s done exactly what she expected – as if it was all for nothing – but when he looks at her there’s nothing like that in her face.

“You have something in mind?” she asks and he runs through a hundred cons in his memory like a flip book. He steals her soda and drinks the last of it, the drink guzzling empty.

“That’s not an answer,” he says and she closes her eyes, laying back again, a bookmark on the conversation.

(The Kate he knew back on the island wanted to be good, wanted to be better, but the Kate he knew hadn’t lost everyone she loved all over (all over) again. The Kate he knew, he thinks, might be looking for a reason. )

He can’t really give her one – but he can stay.

+

One blistering day in November he catches her crying in the bank over her withdrawal, clutching a letter in her fist and pushing away from him when he tries to catch her.

“What is it?” he exclaims, following her outside, old frustrations at her moods bubbling to the surface. He’s older, but not much wiser. “Who’s that letter from?”

She doesn’t speak, angrily wiping at tears as she curls up in the passenger seat, so he tugs the letter from her as gently as he can.

“I forgot,” she says, pulling her knees to her chest. “I forgot it was his birthday.”

And just like that, he decides. It’s not a heist, it’s not aimless, it’s _home_. He puts the car into gear, giving her space, and points the car west.

+

She’s furious at him when she recognizes the road signs but relents. They sneak in under cover of night, in case the cops are still on active alert for her, and Sawyer gets a message to Claire. The reunion is short, and private, but he’s never seen her so whole as when she sees Claire and Aaron again.

(A glimpse of the woman he’d left behind shimmers to the surface and he catches at it with the tips of his fingers, hopeful.)

If she needs a reason, he’ll give it to her.

There’s a scuffle when they leave – an undercover cop watching from three houses over, even after all this time – but this time, they escape with only battered bruises.

(Death, he thinks, has maybe given them a break at last.)

+

One day out of Los Angeles, she disappears into the bathroom again, a routine he has become accustomed to. He’s more surprised than anything that they are here again, that she’ll go back on the run again with him.

On the other hand, he’s not _that_ surprised.

(Claire was always more talkative than Kate.)

When she emerges, he looks up as usual, curious to see who she is now. Pulling off his glasses, his heart stops in his chest.

(It’s a familiar feeling.)

She’s dyed her hair brunette. Grown out as it is, she almost looks the picture of who she was seven – hell, _seven_ years before. A few more scars, a few more freckles, but –

“Kate,” he says, and his breath crackles in his lungs. She takes a step towards him, hesitant and untamed as ever. He swallows hard as she approaches him and when she smiles, a bright light fills the gloom of the room. He gambles everything in an instant, sliding his hands atop her waist.

“It was time,” she says, leaning over him and bracing herself with a hand on his shoulder. “Looks close enough.” He nods, tilting his head up to meet her, his mind buzzing with static. When she kisses him, he lets out a shaky exhale into her mouth, familiar and foreign. She pulls away, only to press another kiss to his lips, catching at one of his bruises and he groans, pulling her closer again to pour years of loss and desire and joy into her.

Stumbling back to the bed, she gives it back to him with a sweet edge that breaks him whole.

(Old habits.)

+

“ _Were_ you looking for me?” he asks later, caging her against the car. He’s still disbelieving.

“What?” she asks, craning her head to look up at him, and he shakes his head. “Tallahassee.”

She rolls her eyes and presses an amused kiss to his throat before stealing away. “Sawyer,” she says, pulling her sunglasses down, “you ask too many questions.”

(He drives. She keeps her shoes propped up on the dashboard.)

_Finis_

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [ladytharen](http://ladytharen.tumblr.com) @ tumblr if you want to say hi.


End file.
